Reality Bytes
by william mckeen
Tweeting, Googling, texting and Facebooking have redefined not only our vernacular, but also our concept of socialization. With women over 50 as Facebook's fastest-growing group of users, and kids getting their first cell phones at an average of 8 years old, is technology taking a bite out of our reality?
Pramod Khargonekar enjoys debating the impact of technology on society. He's taught a class for freshmen on the topic, which is what gave us the idea for this article.
It's too late to stop now.
Six centuries ago — a mere eyebrow twitch in the grand scheme of history — information existed in hand-copied books owned only by the wealthy and the clergy. Today, a buffet of information is a couple clicks away from a 6-year-old with his mother’s laptop.
It’s all happened so fast, in that figurative twitch. A century ago, people still had to go to libraries or bookstores to find out stuff. Today’s students have advantages even their parents didn’t have 20 years ago. Unlike mom and pop, these kids can copy-and- paste from a Web site and commit plagiarism without cracking a book. And they don’t need to go to Barnes & Noble to actually buy a book. They’re set up for one-click shopping on Amazon.
“Is technology really making us wiser people and truly productive people? The whole notion of information overload and connectivity are significant issues.” —Pramod Khargonekar
Nobody (least of all an engineer) wants to turn back this Tsunami of advancing information. With its focus on improving the world and making life better, engineering has made this truly incredible information technology possible.
But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with raising a hand, asking a few questions, and suggesting maybe we should pause and consider what’s going on.
The hand belongs to Pramod Khargonekar, outgoing dean of the University of Florida College of Engineering. As he contemplates life post-deanship, he’ll be returning to the classroom. He sees himself standing in front of 18- and 19-year-olds, helping them deal with the growing information overload this generation faces. It’s a problem their parents and grandparents didn’t have.
“It’s clear that of all the technological developments in the last half century, information technology has truly revolutionized the way we live,” Khargonekar says. “And I don’t use the word ‘revolutionized’ casually.”
The information explosion changed the world on a scale equal to the transformations wrought by automobiles and air travel, he says, because all of them profoundly affected the way people live.
In 2006, Khargonekar taught a freshman course called Information Technology and Society, and that class might serve as the dress rehearsal for what he does in his post-dean years. Talking to young people about this technology he watched develop — which was as integral to the students’ childhoods as SpongeBob SquarePants — was eye-opening.
“I wanted to tell students that technology doesn’t live by itself,” Khargonekar says. “Technology creates change and change creates new societal issues. I wanted us to look at the interplay between technological developments and societal developments. I wanted students to see technology and not view it as magical, as this thing that just happens.”
But what is still new and magical for the professor is old stuff to the students. Information overload is a way of life to them. Today’s college freshmen were born in the early 1990s and they can’t remember a world without the Internet.
To this generation, technology is life. It has, among other things, redefined the basic human concept of friendship. With the online social-networking site Facebook, students can friend (note verb) people they don’t really know, and they become Facebook Friends, something very different, with different responsibilities and obligations, from real friendship. A Facebook Friend, for example, doesn’t have to help you move out of your apartment. A real friend doesn’t get off the hook so easy.
Facebook, of course, is so 2008. The new social-network kid on the block is Twitter, which demands brevity (140 characters per post) and reduces life to a series of trivialized updates called “Tweets” by participants: “In line at the grocery and I forgot the pantyhose!” “I am so over this lecture.” “Running late — no coffee for me.” (If you have second thoughts and want to erase your post, the program asks, “Delete this Tweet?” — a sentence that would have meant nothing outside a birdcage mere months ago.)
Khargonekar does not have a Twitter account, though he muses about the possibility. Still, he sees it as a tool with great potential, both for transmitting information and also for the trivialization of human life.
The plethora of technological devices developed to save time also ends up consuming much of it and, as Ernest Hemingway said, “Time is the thing we have the least of.”
Novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe is among those who arch eyebrows over the time and labor-saving devices granted us by technology. Such things as iPhones and Twitter “waste more time than anything else in American life,” he says. “The computer and the Internet are the contemporary versions of knitting and badminton in the backyard, except that they have nothing to show for it afterward, the way knitting does, and lead to atrocious sedentary posture and sloth, unlike badminton.”
“The computer and the Internet are the contemporary versions of knitting and badminton in the back yard, except that they have nothing to show for it afterward, the way knitting does, and lead to atrocious sedentary posture and sloth, unlike badminton.” —Tom Wolfe
Wolfe’s social criticism has marked his journalism and his fiction, most notably in his satirical novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. As the man responsible for tagging those who achieved adulthood in the 1970s as “the Me Generation,” Wolfe’s antennae are alert to any new examples of silliness and narcissism. Tweeting one’s most mundane activities is high goofiness indeed.
Khargonekar agrees with Wolfe. What’s most important, he says, is how we use technology. It’s easy to fall in love with each new device and development. “There is euphoria with any new technology,” he says. “Of course, there are excesses that happen, but in time these things will take their place in the scheme of things.”
But critics such as Wolfe worry “these things” that are supposed to make life better could make things worse. He uses Thomas Jefferson as an example. He had at least eight careers in addition to his job of creating American democracy. “Today,” Wolfe laments, “two-thirds of his life would be consumed answering inane e-mails.” If Jefferson had a Twitter account, we might all still be foreigners.
By all accounts, Jefferson answered every letter he ever received and, Wolfe points out, he used the “outmoded technology” of pen and ink. Wolfe’s favorite writers — and here he ticks off Dickens, Balzac, Zola — also wrote in longhand. Wolfe himself logs onto a computer only at gunpoint and still writes in a flourishing script that looks remarkably like John Hancock’s signature.
Again Khargonekar finds himself agreeing with Wolfe, especially in noting that technology gives us the freedom to trivialize our precious time on Earth.
“I hope thoughtful people will consider Wolfe’s criticism and find ways of using technology in a responsible manner, instead of being less wise and less productive,” he says.
Khargonekar recognizes that anyone who suggests a pause in the overwhelming advance of information technology risks being cast aside as a Luddite, even for the most warm-milk criticism. (In 19th century England, a group of artisans known in history as the Luddites protested the industrial revolution by destroying machines. Today, anyone who whispers any qualms about technology is immediately spat upon as a Luddite.)
Wolfe has built his half-century writing career on a foundation of infuriating the status quo and so he doesn’t mind the occasional “Luddite” or “mossback” tossed his way. “The Luddites showed their ignorance by destroying the new machines,” Wolfe says. “Modern man, in his wisdom, has only to increase his production and speed up his life by ignoring them.”
As an engineer, not a social critic in a vanilla ice-cream suit, it’s not Khargonekar’s nature to ignore technology, but he does nod at the concerns voiced by Wolfe and others.
“What Wolfe is saying is deeper than that,” Khargonekar says. “Is technology really making us wiser people and truly productive people? The whole notion of information overload and connectivity are significant issues. Technologies are neither good nor evil. It depends on how we use them. Consider nuclear technology. We bombed Japan, but France is getting 80 percent of its energy from nuclear power. Automobiles come with a cost to the environment, but they made people free. It all depends on how we use it.”
In a world in which a few keystrokes and a search engine can help us find exactly what we are looking for, we may miss finding the things we didn’t know we were looking for. The serendipity of turning a newspaper page and falling into a fascinating abyss of information might be lost in the new world order.
As the newspaper goes the way of the dodo and the Edsel, readers construct facsimiles by plugging a list of interests into a search engine. They then get all the news they want of celebrity sightings and the victories of their favorite sports teams. Few people put “starvation,” “injustice” and “bigotry” into their search engines, and so this technology that can bring us closer together can also end up distancing us from one another. It will be possible for someone to consider themselves well informed — after all, they “read a lot” — and go through life without ever encountering anything to upset or outrage them. One of the functions of journalism is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.” If the comforted choose to cocoon themselves only in comfort, will there ever be change or outrage or cries for social justice?
And this is one of the things that most worries Khargonekar about the next generation, which is suckling at the bosom of new and overwhelming information technology. Will the next generation become a society that bows before technology, allowing it to lead? Or will it take the lead?
Technology can be used to help construct productive and useful lives. Beyond that, there might be ways to unlock technology’s potential to make us more human, to help us become more compassionate and social. Technology can help us embrace the flesh and blood rather than celebrate and perpetuate the synthetic humanity online.
“I do see an optimistic side of the coin,” Khargonekar says. “When you enter a search term and get a thousand results, you will see things that you never expected. There is still the possibility of serendipity there.” The link structure of the Internet also allows readers — scientists and engineers, in particular — to find citations instantly, instead of trolling library stacks, looking for orphaned, dusty volumes.
But the pessimistic side of the coin has to do with trust. “The concern that I have is that young people have lost the ability to tell good information from bad,” Khargonekar says. “I ask librarians, ‘How are you going to teach students what’s reliable and what’s not?’ The great thing about books is that what you are reading is most likely true. But in the age of the Internet, everybody’s a publisher.”
Indeed. The Internet has democratized the media to a large extent, allowing all sorts of geniuses-with-ideas to have a forum. Not since the days of the colonial press has there been such an even playing field. To stand up to media monopolies a decade ago was a futile mission on par with tilting at windmills. Today, a Web address and an idea are all you need to become a publisher.
But of course there is a downside. Even a moron can till 40 acres of cyberspace and fill readers’ heads with lies and ignorance. Yet to many students, a blog carries the weight of a major news organization’s Web site. “When the New York Times publishes something, I know that great thought has gone into that article before I saw it,” he says. “A blogger can do and say whatever he wants and some students may believe him.”
Time, that thing we have the least of, will help us sort it all out. “There is real balance over time between the wisdom of crowds and wisdom that arises from long, deep expertise,” Khargonekar says. “Eventually I anticipate we will achieve some sort of balance. The wisdom of crowds will never replace Einstein. The wisdom of crowds has something to tell us about total human experience and the total human view. And that brings these questions into sharper focus.”
Of course there’s no one “right answer” because there are so many questions. We haven’t even thought of all the questions yet.
And that’s what invigorates Khargonekar as he prepares for re-entry into his teaching orbit. “I want students to be deeply aware of this connection between technology and society,” he says.
When he walks into the classroom that first day, the sky
will be full of questions. 
© 2008 university of florida college of engineering. all rights reserved.